Biology Digest

 

  We have some exciting news to share after testing some of your protein designs in the lab. Plus we've got new puzzles and a fresh Design of the Month. - - - - - You don't have to be a scientist to do science. Download and play Foldit and you can help researchers discover new antiviral drugs that might stop coronavirus. The most promising solutions are being manufactured and tested at the University of Washington Institute for Protein Design in Seattle. Foldit is FREE and not-for-profit: https://fold.it/​ This video features Foldit scientist Brian Koepnick, PhD. It was produced by Ian Haydon. - - - - - Note: Foldit is an interactive computer game and not a distributed computing project. If you would like to donate spare CPU cycles to science, please check out the Rosetta@Home project on BOINC at https://boinc.bakerlab.org/

  Happy 20th Anniversary to the folding at home project crew. For those of you that are involved in the COVID-19 project for folding at home this was one of the bioinformatic projects that tried to look for the folding mechanisms for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The contributions was that  distribution computing over protein calculations over many users. This is one of the silver linings of 2020. However these projects were originally about examining cell biology among cancer cells and or proteins that are expressed in response to a genetic defect at the time of the projects founding. In the past year Folding@home and its competitors such as Rosetta@home, Foldit and World Community Grid have done the task on calculating the mechanisms of the  SARS-COV-2 Virus that lead to the design of the COVID-19 vaccine. It was one of the contributing factors in accelerating the clinical trial process in the past year.   Note this video is an interview of Folding @ Home's history back in the early 2000